Part of what’s been drawing me toward JRPGs as a genre as of late has been the way different games emphasize different parts of its core. For as similar as many JRPGs look on the surface - battle systems, overworlds, big stories and big numbers - there’s always a lot of choices made by individual development teams on where their game’s full focus should lay. Because if the aspects I just listed all have one thing in common, its that they’re all often aiming to be as big and vast in scope as possible. In stretching the focus of a game’s development too thin to achieve the highest quality across all aspects, many games wind up biting off more than they can chew, and become flawed, bloated messes as a result.

This is, in part, what made Paper Mario: Color Splash so intriguing to me. It, along with its much-derided prequel, was one of the first instances I’ve yet seen of a JRPG franchise actively aim to re-pivot their focus to a drastic degree.

The quality of a newer Paper Mario game can never really be discussed without first addressing the series’ first two games: Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. These games, much like Super Mario RPG before it, adapted the complexities of normal JRPG combat into a fantastic, streamlined, yet still nuanced and fun set of systems to welcome Mario fans to a more tactical form of play. Celebrated as the games may have been, something was definitely lost in that transition from platformer to JRPG - Though combat is smart and cleverly thought through, the worlds that tie them together are often barren in design, nothing more than a means to deliver more battles and more narrative. The focus of the original Paper Mario games was placed almost entirely on combat and story, while turning level design and the player’s interactions with said levels into somewhat of an afterthought.

Though its easy to write the series' third game off as merely an experimental side-game, its hard to play Super Paper Mario without getting the sense that the developers were unsure where to take their RPG sub-series after its first two entries. They’d succeeded in making an RPG combat system that was simple to understand but deviously fun to play around with, yet in the process of doing so abandoned almost everything that defined the act of playing Super Mario. That is of course the nature of spin-offs in some sense - to offer a different play experience to the real thing - yet I can’t help but feel as if the developers at Intelligent Systems felt frustrated in their inability to do more with the Mario branding as part of their games’ DNA. And despite a bumpy first attempt in Paper Mario: Sticker Star, I do believe they captured something special in their second go around at this new direction. Five games in, and Paper Mario was finally beginning to rediscover its own voice.

The amount of flack that Sticker Star and its following sequels would receive was inevitable, as the areas in which they evidently failed are the ones that Paper Mario used to succeed effortlessly in. The combat mechanics in all three games are half-baked at best and completely mindless at worst, as even the genuine effort to present more depth to combat in Paper Mario: The Origami King ended up messy and poorly thought through. All three games are infamously lacking in narrative depth, with conflicts so simple that two of them simply involve Bowser harnessing a new power to cause mayhem without ever evolving beyond that. The Origami King’s effort to place a new antagonist in charge doesn’t do much to change that the story is tragically one-note in progression and depth. This shallowness applies to the cast of characters the games sport, with the amount of total new characters introduced across all three games sitting below double digits. Once again The Origami King pushes its head against the ceiling more, with more distinctly characterized bosses and temporary party members, yet its held back by the amount of compromises each of these characters come packaged with in their execution.

As the latest entry in the series and the one pushing hardest to overcome its weaknesses, you may be surprised to find that I’m less fond of The Origami King than far safer Wii U game its a sequel to. This brings us back to what I discussed at the very start of the review - the troubles in stretching a project too thin, and for developers to pick a direction and stick with it. While all of The Origami King’s efforts are commendable, I find it leads to a somewhat messier and less clear-cut experience on the whole compared to Color Splash.

Color Splash has a complete waste of a combat system and a very shallow, uninteresting story. Yet with those two things set aside, I find that the developers were instead able to place their focus on refining everything else as part of the package. The reduced scope in comparison to its sequel feels almost directly related to the game’s biggest strength: Color Splash is overall a fantastically snappy, well paced out adventure. By using the level-by-level structure of Sticker Star to its advantage, it gives each section of the game a very clearly defined start and endpoint, allowing a breezy journey befitting of the game’s vacation-island theming. Part of what really helps sell the pace is the core mechanic of coloring in the environment across every level, effectively a set of collectibles strewn about every part of the game like Star Coins in New Super Mario Bros. Levels can now not only just be beaten, but 100%:ed with little hassle, and seeing a flag raised across each of the many levels in the game never stops being satisfying. The amount of visual variety also helps, as the game’s color palette is as varied as its title would suggest and never lets up on creative, pleasant environments for Mario to bounce between. The entrance to a water-themed prison base turns out to be an out-of-nowhere underwater game show, a train heist is stopped before it can begin by the passenger’s need to stop for a meal Mario has to help cook up, the haunted mansion sits next to an aristocratic park flooded with poison - when paired with a surprisingly open-ended structure in level progression, it never feels as if you’re in one environment for too long.

It’s through stuff like this that the shift in focus compared to the Paper Mario games of old is most apparent: The level design is impressively fun across the whole game, asking the player to be perceptive, do simple platforming, solve puzzles, and occasionally have fast reflexes, to clear individual levels before moving onto the next. Even though combat depth may have careened off a cliff, this amount of effort placed into the game’s level design is a far cry from the endless sets of corridors that filled The Thousand Year Door. It becomes all the more interesting to think about when compared to the aforementioned Super Paper Mario, which despite its similar efforts to de-emphasize the RPG-ness of gameplay, still couldn’t find much of a purpose to its gameplay-first design and wound up falling back on an engrossing narrative first and foremost. I believe it speaks magnitudes to Color Splash’s strengths that its able to remain engrossing and genuinely fun for its entire runtime without much of any overarching narrative for the player to follow.

Color Splash sets out to give players a fun time exploring a big world split up into bite-sized chunks, and does so with buckets of charm. Every level in the game is home to some sort of setpiece that makes it stick out in your mind, or further sells a joke that could’ve well just been presented in a dialogue box. Huey as a character isn’t anything particular as a companion to Mario, yet his comments keep the tone of the game consistently gleeful - though the actual events driving the conflict could have easily been framed as gruesome and serious, the game remains content in just giving you a good, harmless experience. The game is outrageously funny across the board: be it through slapstick or sharp writing with pitch-perfect localization, it never lets too many moments go by without almost wringing a smile out of you. This commitment to a feel-good experience is part of why I can’t really be too upset with the combat system being as flimsy as it is: The game bends over backwards to ensure that you never have a tough time with combat, handing out cards and paint at every step and always clearly communicating what specific Thing-cards are needed to beat each world’s boss. Really, with all three aforementioned resources, it’s almost as if the main purpose of the combat in the game is to drive you to explore even more - a feedback loop of rewarding your exploring with faster and less tedious battles.

I’ve grappled with this concept ever since I first started thinking about the JRPGs I liked and disliked - a good combat system isn’t really needed to make a good JRPG, so long as things are built around it. Most JRPGs offer easy modes that turn combat into a complete formality (Pokémon practically forces you into it), yet these playthroughs are still enjoyed by the fun found elsewhere in the game. Then again, a game like Final Fantasy XIII manages to catch scrutiny for its lack of world design, despite having one of the best combat systems in the franchise. A lot of people simply don’t gel with the balance between combat and non-combat being tipped too far into one direction, yet I often find games become far less impressive on the whole when the two end up worse than they could be due to each other. Had Final Fantasy XIII had layered, intensely designed dungeons with layers of movement mechanics and collectibles to watch out for, a player’s focus would diverge from the actual meat of the game in the combat - the player’s attention would be spread almost as thin as that of the developers. And while I'm not arguing that Color Splash would've been a worse game had it had an actually interesting combat system, I do believe the developers chose the right thing to prioritize.

In the end, Paper Mario: Color Splash isn’t a game meant to blow you away as the JRPG that solved all the genre’s issues or hurdles, nor one meant to awe you with its scale. Much like the Wii U itself, it sits contently in the corner knowing its downplayed ambitions were enough to make some people happy. And I’m glad to be one of those people.

[Play Time: 30 Hours]
[Key Word: Content]

Pizza Tower is a perfect videogame. A crowning achievement in videogaming. One of the finest videogames the world has ever known. Everything about the videogame is perfect. Presentation is aces, from the psycho 90s cartoon aesthetic to the little things like the game needing a button prompt to turn the lights on in the file select menu (lest something FUNNY happen). The music is nothing but fantastic, catchy tunes that set the tone for the levels and bosses to follow.

Level are designed to put your mastery of the games incredible movement to the test as you bash, throw and piledrive your way through all sorts of crazy bullshit the game throws at you. Every level also has some different shit to throw at you, like taking taxis to optional areas in a city level only for you to be sent to jail because the taxi turned out to be a cop car. Or the animatronic jumpscare level. Or the damn Mort the Chicken for the Playstation One console level.

Going for 101% really gave me an appreciation for how the game and the levels are structured. The highest honor you can get in a Pizza Tower level is the P rank. P rank means you reached a certain score threshold while obtaining all collectibles in the level while never dropping your combo, which is added upon by defeating enemies and kept going by collecting points. In practice, going for P ranks is like Crash Bandicoot 4's perfect relics, except Pizza Tower is significantly less punishing and repetitive which makes the process of perfecting a level actually fun. Except for Gnome Forest, no one has fun in Gnome Forest.

Last thing I want to rant about is that while the story is largely basic the game's ending which is just excellently put together. The game foreshadows what's going to go down and you get it but you don't care because it's so sick it doesn't even matter. You get your chance to fight the bastard that's been tormenting you the whole game, there's a little surprise in there, and then the final stretch of the boss and the subsequent mad dash out is pure catharsis in a way games rarely do.

All in all, perfect videogame. Purchase it now, and then purchase it later when it's ported probably. After that, purchase it again when it gets a physical release. And then play it, I heard the game's pretty good.

pizza tower is perfect. it is the most perfectly realized version of what it set out to be. its like a dream brought to life. all the movement feels so perfectly aligned with the level design. it can be demanding, but learning a stage and being able to traverse it quickly and smoothly is the best i've ever felt playing any platformer. it makes it a little frustrating seeing complaints about having to replay levels when you miss things.. the game wants you to replay levels! every time you play a level again you learn a little more, you can carry your combos a little further, you can find a new secret or a new shortcut. the game's level count isn't massive because of how meticulously designed and dense each level is. the other big thing i love about the game is that it is incredibly funny! it's one of the funniest games i've ever played! it has a great cartoon slapstick sense of humor that runs deep. i still laugh when i charge toward an enemy and they let out a scream of horror at the scary italian man barreling toward them.

overall, this is a game i would recommend to anyone and everyone. it might be a bit of a challenge if you don't have any experience with games like this, but if you're able to put the time into it, it's rewarding and fun! and even if you're bad at it, i think it'll still make you laugh!

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

It has been an insane start for this year of gaming. Hi-Fi Rush, Dead Space, and now Pizza Tower?! I can't think of the last time I played a collection of brand new games in a row and I thought they were all genuinely phenomenal like this.

Pizza Tower fucking rocks. This game is so incredibly into its own self, with zero care or interest for any of the bland trends of game development, and it shows 100% of the time. The whole crude art style and animation feels reminiscent of those raunchy games I'd play on Newgrounds when I was a kiddo. It's charming as hell, making for probably one of the most unique looking video games I've ever played. The presentation is just amazing; from the visuals, humor, and that sweet, sweet, bop of an OST. There's not a single time this game loses that mojo.

The gameplay is allegedly very inspired off Wario Land, which I can't attest to as I've never played any Wario title; but what I CAN say is that it is unbelievably fun. Intense, fast, platforming accompanied by an Italian chef who will roll, dive, and piledrive through every enemy that comes his way. The very basics of its level design work so fluidly, making for each and every level to stand out and feel like just an absolute rush to play through and replay again and again.

But it doesn't stop there, because this game has fun, unique gimmicks and moves that are part of almost every single level. It shakes it up constantly, making for a platformer experience that never once feels like it's losing steam or getting tiresome. Like that wasn't enough already, it also has some really exhilarating boss fights. Each boss is challenging enough to force you to learn their patterns or suffer defeat. They're adrenaline-filled challenges the game throws at you, but equally just as fun to make you want to see how fast you can beat them or if you can do it without getting hit.

Pizza Tower is an indie darling that not only showcases strong innovation, but also just how good the future of gaming can be when creativity and passion are at the forefront. I think this is a title that stands firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the very best that the world of indie games have to offer.

I wish this game would run better because it does a lot of cool shit and is probably the best actual pokemon game in a long time; it just is hard to appreciate it when half the time the cool shit is happening at 15 FPS.

Absolutely love the ending though, I would have never expected a pokemon story to be like that

8/10

In an optional, visually stunning level in the early Jungle world of the game, players can peek through the leaves and foliage to see pirate ships, docked by the beach in the distance. That same beach and those same pirate ships make up the scenery for the game’s second world, and as you progress further through it you notice more and more how the ships are showing up torn and mangled to pieces. By the end of the world, the weather grows stormier and a huge octopus appears from below the surface, gruesomely tearing ships apart in the background of the stage before challenging the big ape himself.

Donkey Kong Country as a series has never placed any real focus on its storytelling, yet as all its fans will tell you it is shockingly good at being atmospheric and moody. And while Returns specifically often gets buried inbetween the praise for the original trilogy and Tropical Freeze, I find it excels at this in a sort of unique way - by having the entire island truly feel like one big, cohesive entity. The scenario I described earlier is never called attention to, yet takes place over the course of about 10 levels, with each step being a very gradual shift from one environment to the next whilst still adhering to their worlds’ visual themes. While many other platformers strive to impress you with their creativity and variety, I find there’s a beauty in trying to make each level feel like a natural progression of the world - that it’s not simply a collection of fun video game environments, but the natural extension of a living, breathing world.

The “Returns” subtitle doesn’t feel like its simply there to denote the franchise coming out of hiatus, but to quite literally describe the game as the first since the series’ inception to truly place the focus on Donkey Kong Island itself. There’s no kidnapping, no journeying, no drastic environmental change - this game, even more so than the original 1995 game, is about showing you the ecosystem and inhabitants of Donkey Kongs home. This is part of why I find the Tiki Tak Tribe to be such a good antagonistic force for the game: rather than turning the conflict into just a brawl against an invading faction, their brainwashing powers mean that now every part of the island is hostile and out of balance to serve someone else’s agenda. Whilst the Tikis take control of an inhabitant of each of the island's areas to serve as the game’s bosses, each area in the game is also befitted with one or more natural rulers outside of this - the Squeekly bats of Crowded Cavern are left completely undisturbed by the mole miners of the cave area, the horde of Muncher spiders in the forest devour anyone who gets close, and a large eyeball-robot observes your every move in the Factory level, seemingly manipulating your progress forward. Throughout this involuntary tour of the island, it feels as DK is constantly intruding on the’ territory of these rulers, disrupting the natural ecosystem and flow of life, to quell a conflict they barely seem aware of. The harmony between rulers and the natural state of the island has been disrupted by the Tikis, all for the sake of them believing their own king is the one who deserves to rule the island as a whole.

So then, with all that said - who’s the ruler of the Jungle?

That’s right - Donkey Kong.

What makes the grueling difficulty of this adventure in particular feel so rewarding to overcome is that, similar to Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it truly feels as if the great ape is asserting his absolute dominance with every world he conquers. Frail as he may seem with only being able to take two hits, he moves with such a visceral weight, slamming onto the heads of enemies with both fists and hitting the ground with a slight thud every time he lands. It’s theorized that a big part of why Donkey Kong himself was sidelined in the Country series in favor of his extended Kong family was due to the difficulty in nailing both the weight and size of this character – play the original Donkey Kong Country, and you’ll notice DK’s silhouette drastically changes when he’s standing still, running, and jumping, which leads to a somewhat inconsistent feel moving the character around. To have this grand return of the character not only emphasize his weight and power, but also seemingly theme the entire story around reasserting his rightful place as ruler of the island, just feels absolutely perfectly befitting. Yet he defeats the king of the Tikis atop DK Island’s volcano, not to claim any sort of dominance or rule of his home, but to return things to the way they were before, and reform that balance of nature. Indeed, in both narrative and design this Return is not here to say that the new should rule and the old has no place, but that all kings have their place in the world.

There are a lot of very valid reasons as to why the game isn’t as fondly remembered as the rest of the series, mostly attributing to Retro Studios’ unfamiliarity in designing for the genre. A big one is the way collectibles are handled, an area the game falls completely flat on compared to how perfectly the trilogy handled it. The puzzle piece system may be a cute way to unlock concept art, but when these somewhat-short levels can have up to nine puzzle pieces on top of the KONG-letters, suddenly the pacing in stages come to a screeching halt. It’s cool that you’re consistently rewarded for pattern recognition, of seeing a stray banana just barely off-screen and following it to reveal a hidden path, but with up to 13 collectibles per stage you’re just bound to miss one lest you check quite literally every possible hiding place one could be in. That means moving left at the start of every level, scraping against every possible wall, collecting every single banana, blowing on every dandelion, and intentionally dying in every split-path just to give yourself the opportunity to double-check the other path. The KONG-letters are far stronger collectibles in terms of how the game is themed, as they’re consistently rewarded to you for actively platforming well and utilizing DK’s abilities to the fullest rather than for having the keen eye of an explorer. The fatigue that can set it from feverishly looking for these collectibles may only enhance the somewhat repetitive level progression: Imagine the feeling of mastering everything a level has to see, only to realize that the next feels virtually identical aside from having a focus on bouncy flowers now.

The game sticking to the standard visuals of its area relatively closely may again be a remnant of Retro’s work on Metroid Prime - rather than indulge in whatever crazy level concept the team could think up for a one-off level akin to Super Mario 3D World, each level is given a sort of purpose on the island, a significance that forms part of the whole. At first, I questioned the sudden appearance of a pirate ship level in the Ruins area, since I was already well past having beaten the Beach area. It was only after I played the level and later reached the world’s boss that the dots connected: The pirate ship level focused on firing explosive bombs, and the boss of the area is a great bird who hoards a collection of explosives all to itself. This not only lets the level serve as great preparation for the properties of these explosives, but can easily be pieced together to form worldbuilding theories, of the pirate crew bargaining with this greedy hoarder to gain access to this artillery. There’s even a great care placed on moving Donkey Kong from area to area, as the first level of most worlds opens with a brief moment of letting the player transition out of the old area into the new, showing for instance the overgrown edge of the caverns leading naturally into the Forest area.

Beyond all of this analysis and babble, the game remains a great platformer first and foremost. The game is still extremely successful at providing that rewarding escalation of challenge that DKC has historically done so perfectly, paired with controls with tons of speed potential. Even though the Wii version in particular has been derided for its Wii-isms, I can’t stress enough how often I feel it genuinely adds to the experience. From your own shaking matching the intense pummeling DK lets out onto the Tikis at the end of each world, to the Wii remote speaking giving you direct and gloriously satisfying sound feedback to each enemy you bop and collectible you get, to genuinely feeling the weight of the handslam attack…

Okay, so maybe the simple, primitive part of my brain took over just now, the part wanted to just call this game a fun, well paced, good platformer from the start without doing this silly literary analysis. And, well... who am I to challenge the king of the jungle?

[Playtime: 8 hours]
[Key word: Reclaim]